Nvidia confirms that their GPUs are not vulnerable to Spectre

Nvidia GPUs are not affected by Spectre

Nvidia confirms that their GPUs are not vulnerable to Spectre

After the release of their latest graphics card drivers, the company received a lot of flack regarding its included Spectre fixes, with many considering it an admission from the company that their graphics hardware is affected by the same issues a most modern CPU architectures.

This announcement has caused many financial analysts to lose faith in Nvidia, causing their share price to suddenly drop, though the company has since recovered after their CES, Jensen Huang, confirmed that their graphics hardware is not affected by spectre.

The reality is that Nvidia updated their drivers to mitigate the problems that could arise when their GPU drivers and software interact with vulnerable CPUs, with the updates being likely to apply to Nvidia's Geforce Experience software primarily. Nvidia's Geforce Experience requires an email address and password, making it a potential security concern for Nvidia, making a spectre patch necessary given the number of CPUs that can be affected by spectre.

Our GPUs are immune. They’re not affected by these security issues,

What we did is we released driver updates to patch the CPU security vulnerability. We are patching the CPU vulnerability the same way that Amazon, the same way that SAP, the same way that Microsoft et cetera are patching, because we have software as well. I am absolutely certain that our GPU [product range] is not affected.

Since this announcement Nvidia's share price has recovered, with Nvidia simply taking recommended security precautions against Spectre, not because their hardware is vulnerable, but because the CPUs it is used with can be.

Some of Nvidia's ARM-based SoCs are vulnerable to Spectre and Meltdown, which is a concern for the company, though these SoCs are not part of Nvidia's primary business. Patches will be released to address these issues in the future.

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